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(Ancona 1907 – Paris 1972)
In the 1920s Alberto Spadolini is set designer at Bragaglia’s Teatro degli Indipendenti, together with De Chirico, Marinetti and Pannaggi; in the 1930s he is decorator with Paul Colin; he becomes dancer without having ever studied dance and he performs with Nati Morales, Mistinguett and Joséphine Baker, with whom he has a tempestuous relationship; Maurice Ravel, Paul Valery, Marléne Dietrich appreciate his ability as choreographer; he is actor with Jean Marais and Jean Gabin; he escapes with actress Catherine Hessling, who was Pierre Auguste Renoir’s model and Jean Renoir’s wife; Pablo Picasso is jealous of him when he poses naked for Dora Maar, who was Picasso’s woman; Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob adore his work as painter; he is journalist for the magazine “Sourire de France”; he is singer and he records some melodic songs in New York; between the 1950s and the 1960s he is illustrator of André-Marie Klénovski’s poetry books; he is dialogue adaptor for the London Film Company owned by Sir Alexander Korda; he often spends his holidays in Porto San Giorgio and Fermo together with Duilio Cicchi and Yvette Marguerie, dance documentary producer; he is restorer of Villa dei Conti Vitali and of Villa Papetti in Fermo; Liane Daydé, Star of the Paris Opera and Rudolf Nureyev’s partner, poses only for him…
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Pas de Quatre: Baker, Spadolini, Ballet, and the Archives
Andrea Harris *
Josephine Baker’s catapult to fame following her debut in La Revue nègre in Paris, 1925, is legendary. From that moment, Baker became an icon of popular culture, inspiring numerous biographies, films, choreographic homage, and an abundance of scholarly writings. One aspect of Baker’s performances that has received less attention, however, is her incorporation of classical ballet. Writers’ brief references to Baker’s work with ballet appear in bits and pieces in the literature, and are often tied to George Balanchine.[i]
Several of these accounts refer to a particular film clip of Baker and an anonymous male dancer performing a ballet duet. A brief segment of the film, the only extant footage of Baker dancing on pointe, appeared in the 1986 British documentary “Chasing a Rainbow: The Life of Josephine Baker.”[ii] But this fleeting image of Baker’s ballet dancing remained unexplained, as details about its source, its context, its date, or the identity of her partner were absent from the existing scholarship. As I would discover with the help of Marco Travaglini, this partner was Alberto Spadolini. This discovery adds an important piece to the puzzle of understanding both Baker’s and Spadolini’s work.
In January 2006, I traveled to Paris to try to find more about Baker’s ballet performances. I was especially interested in locating this unidentified film. Finally, through a combination of sheer luck and the expertise of the staff at the Gaumont-Pathe archives, I found the film in its entirety. The film is of a Bal des Petits Lits Blancs, a charity event held annually in Paris, and it includes part of “an unpublished dance by Josephine Baker.” But I was still unable to date the film or to identify the male dancer.
By the summer of 2006, I was growing frustrated by the scarcity of information I had been able to find on Baker and ballet. From publicity photos, I knew that Baker performed in the 1932 revue La Joie de Paris wearing a long tutu and pointe shoes, so I began doing Google searches, casting my net to see if something more on Baker’s ballet performances might exist. When I searched for “Baker and ‘La Joie de Paris,’” an article by Travaglini on his uncle, Spadolini, appeared. I emailed Travaglini and he shared his research on Spadolini and Baker with me. When I learned that the two had danced together from 1932-1935, I realized that the male dancer in the film could be Spadolini. I sent the clip to Travaglini, who confirmed that it was indeed his uncle dancing with Baker. The artist’s strong profile and physique are clear in the film, and the anonymous male dancer is finally identified as Alberto Spadolini.
Knowing Spadolini’s identity helps narrow the time period of the film clip. Spadolini’s movements clearly reflect training in ballet. He moves with a consistently light, lifted quality that contrasts earlier descriptions of his “savage dancing.” Anton Giulio Bragaglia wrote that Spadolini was unversed in the academic technique when he began dancing. It was not until a few years after his 1932 debut that he began studying with Alexander Volinine, a dancer with the Ballets Russes and partner to Anna Pavlova. Thus, the duet must have been filmed sometime between 1934, when Spadolini began ballet lessons, and 1935, when his partnership with Baker ended.
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| Spadolini and Joséphine Baker (Pierre Payen, 1933) |
In the duet, Spadolini’s costume—tights, boots, a tall hat, and a cape—and the steps he performs—pas de bourrée, pas de basque, brisé, and balloné—are derived from the classical tradition. The two dancers do not come into physical contact until the ending of the dance, but Spadolini’s attention stays focused on Baker, in the classical custom of showcasing the female dancer. When she either drops something or it falls off her costume (it is difficult to tell), he promptly picks it up and tosses it off stage, displaying the quick instincts of a professional performer. His footwork is quick and light, skimming across the floor in a detailed rhythm. Volinine was famous for his virtuosic sequences of beats, or rapid crossings of the lower legs, and, as a teacher, was known for increasing his students’ elevation in jumps. Spadolini’s intricate footwork and nimble balon likely point to his teacher’s influence.
In contrast, Baker’s dancing mixes ballet and jazz. Her costume is not wholly classical, but rather combines an elegant ball gown with pointe shoes. As she prances around Spadolini, she does not lift her torso away from gravity, but rather bends her knees and accentuates each step, as if the ballerina’s fluttering string of bourrées were slowed down, stretched out, turned-in, and transformed qualitatively from floating to strutting. Her pointe work does not replicate the lyricism of ballet, but instead is syncopated and grounded. She executes a rendition of “trucking,” an African American vernacular step, on the tips of her toes, leaning forward slightly at the waist and breaking the long clean lines of the classical body by sticking her seat out behind her.
The disparity between Baker’s and Spadolini’s styles suggests that this duet was not the work of a single choreographer. Moreover, because both Baker and Spadolini had a history of working independently, it would make sense that each created their own steps in the duet. Travaglini asserts that Spadolini choreographed his own dances and wrote in his papers that he never danced the same dance twice.[iii] Baker also preferred to improvise on stage, and according to Jean-Claude Baker, her adopted son and biographer, she would constantly change the material that others choreographed for her.[iv] It is likely that Baker and Spadolini each choreographed their own parts, then collaborated to coordinate their spatial patterns and add partnering. Spadolini and Baker finished their dance with a lift that was common in 1930s musical revue dancing, in which Spadolini takes Baker’s hands and pulls her towards him in a jump that lands on one knee.[v]
Whereas Baker creates a hybrid form that combines ballet and jazz, Spadolini adheres to the danse d’école in their duet. The fact that the two dancers depart stylistically signals developments in the artistic interests of each. Baker was gaining more agency over her public image and her performances at this time, and the hybridity she explored in this duet was part of her larger interest in how to blur the boundaries of racial and cultural codes and meanings.[vi] Similarly, Spadolini’s dancing points to his own aesthetic. In the 1950s, Spadolini created a series of paintings of ballet dancers that diverged from the dancing he knew in the music halls.[vii] His paintings depicted not the passionate, athletic, and partially nude dances he performed and saw in the revues of the 1930s, but rather the cool and harmonious classicism of ballerinas in long white tutus posed with gentle and reflective port de bras and épaulement. As Rosella Simonari notes, the idealization of the classical dancers in these paintings indicates the relationship between Spadolini’s devout religious faith and his spiritual approach to dance.[viii] Spadolini’s dancing in this pas de deux anticipates his later painterly classicism and illuminates connections between his two “lives” as dancer and painter.
Discovering Spadolini’s identity as Baker’s partner in this film clip is important for both dance and art history. It not only reveals that Baker’s work with ballet was not always tied to Balanchine, but also connects Baker’s and Spadolini’s worlds, and thus the worlds of primitivism, jazz, and classicism that intersected not only in their partnership, but also throughout the Paris art world. As such, it invites more questions about the interrelations and the contingencies between the multiple faces of modernism in the early twentieth century.
[i] For example, Baker’s biographers, Patrick O’Connor and Ean Wood, claim that Balanchine taught Baker private ballet lessons in Paris. In the 1990s, American dance scholars drew on O’Connor’s and Wood’s work to cast Baker as one of the Russian choreographer’s sources of inspiration for his modernist reworking of classical ballet. See Patrick O’Connor and Bryan Hammond, Josephine Baker (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988) 118; Ean Wood, The Josephine Baker Story, New ed. (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2002) 220-221, 239-240; Sally Banes, “Balanchine and Black Dance,” Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, ed. Sally Banes (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1994) 58; Dixon Gottschild, Brenda, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996) 70; Beth Genné, “’Glorifying the American Woman’: Josephine Baker and George Balanchine.” Discourses in Dance 3:1 (2005): 31-57.
[ii] Chasing a Rainbow: The Life of Josephine Baker, narr. Olivier Todd, dir. Christopher Ralling, Csaky, 1986.
[iii] Marco Travaglini, email to the author, 26 July 2006.
[iv] Jean-Claude Baker, personal interview, 24 July 2006.
[v] When Beth Genné showed the film clip to Frederick Franklin, who danced with Baker in the 1930s, he told her that this jumping lift was common to 1930s music-hall repertory. See Genné 54, n.16.
[vi] In the 1930s, Baker’s performances increasingly mixed conventional signs and meanings in a way that challenged perceptions of race, gender, and genre. For example, the 1932 revue La Joie de Paris (in which both Baker and Spadolini appeared), featured a series of tableaux that inverted racial and cultural signifiers: in one, Baker appeared as a white chanteuse and sang the famous song “J’ai deux amours,” in another, she cross-dressed as a male band leader, and in another, she parodied a Baroque ballerina. In 1931, Baker co-authored a novella, Mon Sang dans tes Veines, that questioned biological concepts of race through the story of a black woman who gives her blood to save her white lover’s life. Later in her life, Baker’s Rainbow Tribe, a group of children whom she adopted from a variety of cultural and racial backgrounds, represents what was perhaps her most overt use of multiculturalism as a means of contesting racialist and racist practices.
[vii] See Rosella Simonari, “In Search of Alberto Spadolini: The Incomplete Mosaic Behind an Extraordinary Life,” ballet~dance magazine (August 2006) <http://www.ballet-dance.com/200608/articles/Spadolini20060700.html>.
[viii] Simonari 3.
Andrea Harris, is Assistant Professor of Dance. She teaches courses in dance history, aesthetics of dance, composition, and modern dance repertory, performance, and technique. Dr. Harris holds an MFA from TCU and a PhD in theatre and drama from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has presented papers at academic conferences including Music and American Cultures, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Society of Dance History Scholars, and as part of the Feminist Historiography Research Group of the American Society for Theatre Research. She is currently editing a collection of dance historian Sally Banes' writings titled Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing, which will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in May 2007. Dr. Harris has also performed nationally and internationally with companies including Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Li Chiao-Ping Dance. She has been part of the dance faculties at the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla (Mexico), Sam Houston State University, and the University of Oklahoma.
Tratto da “BOLERO-SPADO’ : SPADOLINI, UNA VITA DI TUTTI I COLORI” Copyright di Marco Travaglini, 2007
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